Gulf Cartel trial raises questions for Mexico's new guard

By Lynn Brezosky :
October 6, 2012
: Updated: October 7, 2012 1:05am

As a plaza boss for the Gulf Cartel, Rafael “Junior” Cárdenas-Vela bragged of owning Mexican officials: “All of them had to work for me.”

BROWNSVILLE — With his dole-outs to public officials and the working press, his cameras in the streets and snitches in the strip joints, and his “soldiers” out-earning peers in factories or farm fields, Rafael “Junior” Cárdenas-Vela's role as a Gulf Cartel plaza boss made him the most powerful man in his smuggling zone south of Texas.

“All of them had to work for me,” he said from the witness stand in a Brownsville federal courtroom, where he testified against Juan Roberto Rincon-Rincon in exchange for leniency in his own case.

The trial ended Sept. 28, with a drug conspiracy conviction for Rincon-Rincon, a man known as “E-5” and “El Primo” who's Cardenas-Vela's childhood playmate, longtime partner in crime and now rival.

It was one of a string Gulf Cartel careers to fizzle to an end in a U.S. courtroom.

Cardenas-Vela, frank that his cooperation would land him the lighter end of a 10 year to life sentencing range, didn't hold back.

The cartel had a piece of pretty much any commodity that came through its turf, he said — even the prescription drugs sold at the pharmacies of Nuevo Progreso. Teams of accountants specialized in different products, and it was unlikely anyone who held back on their “piso,” or tax, would do so for long.

Yet the Gulf Cartel heir apparent — Cardenas-Vela is nephew to imprisoned former cartel head Osiel Cárdenas Guillén — may be part of a legacy model of Mexican drug capo, one whose penchant for town square tranquility has been replaced for now by ever more shocking violence.

A generation is coming of age amid gruesome images of death splayed out on newspapers' front pages and disseminated through social media.

With President-elect Enrique Peña Nieto set to take power in Mexico, the question seems not so much whether drug smuggling and its informal economy that employs as much as 40 percent to 50 percent of the population will continue, but whether there's hope for ebbing the violence.

“Peña Nieto has three objectives of security: reduce the bloodshed, reduce the bloodshed, reduce the bloodshed,” said George Grayson, a College of William & Mary professor who is co-author of “The Executioner's Men,” a book about what's been called Mexico's most diabolical criminal organization: Los Zetas.

Experts widely agree that incoming Peña Nieto can't just return to the days of looking the other way.

“He could strike a deal with (Zeta leader) El Cuarenta? I don't think so,” Grayson said. “Things are too mercurial. ... The cartels are fighting with each other and the rules of the game have all broken down.”

It was Osiel Cárdenas Guillén, notoriously secretive and paranoid, who formed the Zetas from deserters of an elite Mexican military unit.

He unleashed a force that, lacking its own firm toehold in the drug business, branched out into other enterprises — extortion, kidnapping, loan sharking, prostitution and allegedly harvesting body parts for the black market.

The trademark of the Zetas, who've wrested control of several former Gulf Cartel strongholds, has become atrocities such as castration, mutilation, beheadings and mass graves. It's a style that's emerged as varying cartels war for control over smuggling routes throughout Mexico.

The Zetas are now hunkered down in Monterrey, a grim development for a cosmopolitan city that is the industrial powerhouse of northern Mexico.

By January, the death toll of the Mexican drug war was estimated at nearly 48,000 since 2006.

The war began in earnest that year, when President Felipe Calderón came into office to find drug cartels were ruling not just various enclaves, but nearly entire states.

The civilian police force was largely on the payroll of the cartels. Heads were flying in the Pacific state of Michoacán.

Calderón brought in the military.

“It was like a cancer that was spreading, and so do you use kind of a selective approach or do you use massive chemotherapy,” Grayson said. “An analogy that I make is he used the broadsword rather than the scalpel.”

Will Glaspy, assistant special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration in McAllen, credited the offensive for significant strides toward upsetting the power structure of the Gulf and other cartels.

“The credit goes to the government of Mexico and their willingness to go after these organizations,” Glaspy said. “There've been changes in each of the cartels over the last five years and those changes are a direct result of the enforcement operations that the government of Mexico has carried out.”

U.S. Rep Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, said Peña Nieto has vowed to continue the offensive, though it may involve a long and painstaking reform of civil law enforcement and the justice system and will require continued support from the United States via programs such as the Mérida Initiative, an infusion of U.S. assistance to fight drug smuggling in Mexico and Latin America.

“They feel that civil law enforcement is the best way to provide the security, but they understand that for a while, as they build up the federal police, they've got to continue to work with the military, because that's what's available right now,” he said.

Cuellar continued, “He wants to focus on reducing the violence, and I know some people have mistaken what he meant by that, but he's not talking about working out deals with the drug cartels or turning the other cheek around. It's just basically a focus on the ones that are causing a lot of the problems for the public in Mexico.”

“One of the dilemmas people struggle with is: What is the goal? If the goal is to finish off organized crime, it's pretty difficult,” he said.

“I think Mexico, especially Tamaulipas, is at the most basic level, which is that they're dealing with out-of-control violence and no one's figured out how to slow that. When you start to do that, then you can look at the deeper problem, problems of corruption and penetration. But you got to start somewhere.”

There is distrust among some not just about the government's capability, if not willingness, to root out a trade that is entrenched within the Mexican economy and fueled by U.S. demand.

“To even believe that the drug cartels could be stopped by a frontal assault or an ongoing war is not just naïve, it's ridiculous,” said Guillermo Paxton, author of “The Plaza,” which focuses on cartel control of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.

“You have billions and billions of dollars that motivate not only people but entire businesses and government that are linked to the cartels,” Paxton said. “You've got entire bands of young people that have no work, no school, no future and they're recruited into these mafias. ... Not only are they doing work killing people for the cartels, but they're also doing extortion. Why not? They already have weapons, they have the know-how, and they don't care about killing people any more.”